"Taglines" need to be interpreted to apply to the edition of a given movie.

"3D," "Director's Cut," "Special Edition" (etc.) should be valid text to have on movie posters. Neither Plex nor Kodi currently allow for multiple versions of a movie to be 'stacked' on one listing. You have to have separate library items for each edition of a movie in your collection. They should have separate poster art too.

Especially since there are currently a bunch of such entries already approved on fanart.tv. Certain moderators are apparently letting it slide. So either way, the official ruling on this text needs to be clarified.

...and by clarified I mean it needs to be allowed, because of course it does.

Example of a poster that is currently allowed on fanart.tv (and was actually submitted by a mod):

There are countless others already approved as well, I just took 5 minutes and reported a bunch of them if you want to check that way.

Here's another poster that I just had denied due to the "edition" text:

Ok, first thing, lose the attitude. It's unnecessary and I can tell you it won't get you far.The rules for Posters were kinda thrown together in a hurry as the section was opened before we even had them. We revisited them before and they were modified to better fit our vision. I'll talk with the other Admin, akovia.We'll try to find a good middle ground so the rules are not bent backward, like it happened in the past.

I only get an "attitude" when people in charge of stuff overlook obvious aspects of their responsibility that they shouldn't overlook. I shouldn't have to make this thread in the first place... especially now, many months after whatever nonsense initially sprang up around the posters section. You guys need to step it up and iron this out for good.

This place might be different than what it was initially envisioned to be but that's just where the chips fell. As far as 90% of your future users are concerned, posters and backgrounds are the only two sections that matter. Everything else could disappear in the wind and no one would bat an eyelash. The rules and moderation policies need to be rock solid for these two sections.

Without even talking about the legalities of this "Release", we have to consider if we want to allow fanart for any video a fan creates or alters. This is kind of a slippery slope in that anyone can alter a video however little and give it a new name and call it a release.

Bambi - The Midnight Madness Remix Edition

I don't find this "quite obvious" that we need to change the rules. There are 42 pages of proposed fan-edits on this site alone. I didn't read each post to see how many are available, but I hope you can see where I'm going with this.http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/forum. ... /forum/11/

I don't see Fan-Edits becoming a part of our site's offerings as it is too much like the wild west. Anyone can create or alter anything and call it a release. Of course this doesn't prevent anyone from creating their own artwork and using it locally in their own media center. You can also upload any artwork you like to themoviedb as they have no moderation there and you can create a release for anything.

As for official studio releases and the associated Edition text, I will talk with ArieS and come up with something. What I'd like to avoid is having someone download fanart for a movie and getting the art for some Edition they don't have. Some special releases are actually referred to in the name of the movie ...

in which case, this is a no brainer and the edition text is allowed and preferred. Unfortunately this isn't always the case and this is what we need to address. The goal here is to come up with a solution that appeals to the bulk of users.

Lastly, you might want to rethink how you interact with the staff here. We are all volunteers doing this because we enjoy supporting the fanart community, but have little patience for being told what we should and should not do/allow/prevent. We are always open for discussions to hone and tweak the rules to allow for a better fanart experience, but we don't get paid enough to put up with arrogant or condescending attitudes. (we don't get paid at all) We are certainly not perfect but we have been doing this a lot longer than most and may actually have some input you haven't considered yet. So feel free to bring up any issues you may have with the site, but please be considerate when doing so. You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.....

I understand and support the "official studio" rule if that's what you decide to go with. Opening the floodgates for just any fan edits is indeed a slippery slope.

At the same time, I think an exception should be made for harmy's Despecialized Editions of Star Wars. These aren't fan edits in the sense that they're doing something new with the material. Harmyy is simply re-creating the original theatrical versions of the Star Wars trilogy since George Lucas refused to ever release them on Blu-ray. The only "official" HD versions of the films are bastardized with the horrendous CG footage from the late 90's Special Edition releases — and have even been further tampered with in the Blu-rays to retcon characters from the prequel trilogy.

For example, if you watch the final scene of Return of the Jedi on Blu-ray you'll see this:

The Despecialized Editions are simply trying to preserve the Star Wars films as they were originally released. It has been a massive undertaking even getting to where they're at and the work still isn't done. These projects have gone "mainstream" for all intents and purposes, they're not niche little fan fiction.

Regardless, the rules need to be hashed out. And even if some special releases are referred to in the name of the movie — no media center software takes this into consideration. Only the *ORIGINAL* theatrical release date is parsed and there is only one version of a given film in the database. This is true for every version of Kodi (XBMC) as well as Plex. It doesn't matter of there's a separate entry on TMDB for Prometheus if the media center never even looks there.

The fact of the matter is that in the particular case of Star Wars, an extremely large number of the XBMC/Plex userbase will be interested in having these versions of the films in their library. Regardless of what you "envision" for your website, there will be high demand for this. Higher than any other fan edit that currently exists or will ever exist in the future. This is Star Wars for fuck's sake, and the average XBMC user is interested in having HD versions of the films he originally fell in love with as a child.

The solution to this is to have two different "levels of priority" for posters. For example, when a moderator approves a poster he or she could flag it to not be voteable or whatever. An "extra" poster, basically. A poster that would only show up in the media center if a user decided to change it themself and would never be automatically downloaded. Since none of the media centers treat different editions as different films (and never will since that would be a nightmare for casual end-users) this is the only way to address your concerns while still allowing what should obviously be allowed.

...and I do still maintain that it's obvious. I'm sorry if you're offended by my tone, but I'm not wrong.

Nopealope wrote:This place might be different than what it was initially envisioned to be but that's just where the chips fell. As far as 90% of your future users are concerned, posters and backgrounds are the only two sections that matter. Everything else could disappear in the wind and no one would bat an eyelash.

I'd say this site is more about the clearlogos and other custom artwork and always has been, personally if posters and backgrounds were to disappear off the site I wouldn't bat an eyelash.

Those sections are there because it's easier for people to get everything from a single source, and we have tried to accomodate that.

As you say, media centres don't take into account a particular version, so I don't get what the issue is, theres manual work either way, nothing stopping someone downloading the standard poster and slapping on whatever tagline they like on it for their own library.

Nopealope wrote:This place might be different than what it was initially envisioned to be but that's just where the chips fell. As far as 90% of your future users are concerned, posters and backgrounds are the only two sections that matter. Everything else could disappear in the wind and no one would bat an eyelash.

I'd say this site is more about the clearlogos and other custom artwork and always has been, personally if posters and backgrounds were to disappear off the site I wouldn't bat an eyelash.

Those sections are there because it's easier for people to get everything from a single source, and we have tried to accomodate that.

As you say, media centres don't take into account a particular version, so I don't get what the issue is, theres manual work either way, nothing stopping someone downloading the standard poster and slapping on whatever tagline they like on it for their own library.

That's true, it just does't jive well with my personal setup. I have fanart.tv set as my only artwork agent in Plex because I want to ensure that all of my posters and backgrounds are high quality. I decided that any time a movie in my library didn't have a poster on fanart.tv I would just create one myself. I then rearranged my Movies library into one giant directory (rather than individual folders for each movie) just so that I wouldn't be tempted to simply download the 400x600 iTunes cover and slap it in the folder. I'm lazy, that's totally what I would do. =P

This way, I either make a poster that gets accepted to fanart.tv or I have the ugly thumbnail. Motivation!

I realize that my personal situation does not affect the whole of the community here, but I figured that my goals aligned with those of the admins. Those goals being to have a high quality poster available for every single movie in my library now and in the future. I don't see how that hurts your website in any way.

As for the clearlogos or whatever, I highly doubt that many of last year's thousands of API requests were trying to download logos. Am I wrong about that?

Perhaps at some point in the past that's what people used the site for... but not anymore.

Last edited by Nopealope on Mon Jan 12, 2015 11:37 am, edited 1 time in total.

Nopealope wrote:As for the clearlogos or whatever, I highly doubt that many of last year's thousands of API requests were trying to download logos. Am I wrong about that?

Perhaps at some point in the past that's what people used the site for... but not anymore.

It's a good question I guess, not easily proven as the API requests pull in the whole feed, however, I would mention that plex didn't even make it into the top 10 of API users: https://fanart.tv/2015/01/top-10-api-traffic-2014/ Artwork Downloader came #2 and while I think it may also grab posters and backgrounds, it's primary purpose is to get the logos for skins that support them in xmbc/kodi

Nopealope wrote:This way, I either make a poster that gets accepted to fanart.tv or I have the ugly thumbnail. Motivation!.

It's a commendable goal, and please don't take any comments that have been made as discouragement, it's great that you want to help out the site so please continue in this fashion.

With that said however, I find myself playing devils advocate a bit here, while I agree rules should be consitently applied, and if there are exceptions to the rules, those exceptions should be explained in the rules, I can also see how the Moderators / Admins would take exception to the "tone" of your demands.

Kode wrote:I would mention that plex didn't even make it into the top 10 of API users: https://fanart.tv/2015/01/top-10-api-traffic-2014/ Artwork Downloader came #2 and while I think it may also grab posters and backgrounds, it's primary purpose is to get the logos for skins that support them in xmbc/kodi

Fair enough.

...though I would hazard a guess and say the reason you see such lower numbers for Plex is because of the personal API key requirement. The average Plex user wouldn't know an API from a hole in the wall — and even for the users that do (i.e. me), it wasn't exactly an intuitive process figuring out how to get my own key here on the website. With that many hoops to jump through, is it really a surprise that you're seeing less usage? Especially when you consider that Plex is the most "accessible" media center out there.

People like for their media art to look good and the stuff you get from TMDB and TVDB can wildly vary in quality. With the curated selection of high quality artwork you have here on fanart.tv, the Plex metadata agent would become a de facto addon quite quickly if it were a bit more user-friendly to set up.